o 0 " PROFILES 57 FOUNDA TION I"'TH FR.ENCH JUST DON T BELIEVE IT T HE Ford Foundation, which two years ago moved its headquarters to New York City from an estate in Pasadena that was known to the staff as Itching Palms, is a large body of money completely surrounded by people who want some. The Foundation is in the business of giving away cash, its function as defined in its charter being "to receive and administer funds for scientific, educational, and charitable purposes, all for the public welfare and for no other purposes. " It is by far the biggest wholesaler in this peculiarly i\..merican field of private enterprise. Its capital consists of ninety per cent of the stock of the Ford Motor Company. On the Foundation's books, this is given the value, for tax purposes, of $417,000,000. This valuation is little more than nominal. Three weeks ago, the Foundation announced that it will begin to diversify its investments in January, when it will put on the market some of its Ford shares, thus finally let- ting the public into the ownership of what has long been the country's largest family-owned corporation. The sale, whIch will be the biggest stock offering in Wall Street's history, will consist of about fifteen per cent of the F ounda- tion's Ford holdings and is expected to bring in between $400,000,000 and $500,000,000. Thus, the present value of the Foundation's capital is at least $2,500,000,000. This is considerably more than half as much money as all the other foundations in the country have among them. The Ford Foundation's liquid capital, which corresponds in a general way to an individual's checking account, fluctuates between $60,000,- 000 and $100,000,000, dependIng on the time of year. (Only SIX other foun- dations are known to have total capital of over $100,000,000.) The Founda- tIon began to spend hlg money in 1950, when it gave away $24,000,000, and has continued on a rising scale ever since. Its spending last year came to just short of $68,000,000, which is four tImes what the second-largest foundation, Rockefeller, normally spends in a year and ten times the annual spending of the third-largest, the Carnegie Corporation. It is also as much as all American foun- dations together spent in anyone year up to and includIng 1948, and it is about a quarter of the total spent by all AmerI- can foundations last year. Since bigness does not bore the Amer- ican public, the Ford Foundation has been chronically In the head- lines. It is becomIng the kind of folklore sym- bol the Ford car once was-the first thing that pops into many people's minds when $1' philan th ropy is men- tioned. There was the time that a California swindler, arrested for passIng bad checks, told the cops that he had spent the money to buy uniforms for a hoys' football team and expected to be reimbursed shortly by a grant from the Ford Foundation, and then there was the South American couple who drove from Paraguay to Detroit in a 1927 Ford, which they hoped to sell to the Foundation, and last summer Pat- rick McGinnis, the belligerent new pres- ident of the New Haven raIlroad, told an audience of commuters, apropos of the contemplated charges for parking in sta tion lots, "If it costs me money, it's going to cost vou money, because I'm a businessman, not the Ford Foundation." Despite the growing tendency to re- gard the Foundation as a symbol, there is an almost incredible amount of con- fusion as to what the Foundation is and does W esthrook Pegler is of the opinion that the Ford F oun dation is a "front for dangerous Communists," while Pravda rather inclines to the view that "the real business of the Ford Foundation is the sending of spies, murderers, saboteurs, and wreck- ers to Eastern Europe." The Hon- orable B. Carroll Reece (Rep. ) , of Tennessee, has warned Congress that there is "important and extensive evi- dence concerning subversive and un- American propaganda activities of the Ford Foundation," while the Czecho- slovakian Home Service Radio has broadcast, "So that future United States espionage agents wIll lack for nothing, the Ford Foundation has do- nated sums runnIng into the millions." The speculations of many Americans are less lurid but not much better in- formed. Indeed, although the Founda- tion's name is constantly coming up in the press and in talk, it would appear that a substantial number of them aren't sufficiently informed to speculate at all; at an) rate, a recent Gallup Poll found that more than half of those interviewed had never even heard of the Ford Foun- dation, which would seem to indicate a rath- er cursory reading of the front pages. Gallup asked the forty per cent who said they had heard of it, "Just in your own words, what is the purpose of the Ford Foundation, what does It do?" About a third of the answers were wrong b} the most liberal marking system: "Gives people work; it's a good fac- tory," "All about better cars," "To help crippled children," "It is a peace pact that has gone to the Red side," "They want labor to do a day's work," "To study diseases and such," and so on. And most of those who had some slight inkling of the Foundation's actual nature-less than a third of the whole population-were on the vague side, giving answers such as "Helps education" and "Supports worth-while research pro jects." It might, therefore, be interesting to see what, In fact, the Ford Foundation has been doing with All That Money. The precise sum that the Ford Foun- dation gave away last year was $67,- 777,741. The operation was performed by some two hundred and forty people- the trustees, a group of twelve eminent citizens that includes Chairman Henry Ford II, who is also president of the Ford Motor Company; about forty staff members, headed by President H. Row- an GaIther, Jr., a former California lawyer, who have something to say about how the money is spent; thir- ty workers In field offices in Karachi, Beirut, Rangoon, Djakarta, and New Delhi; and around a hundred and sixty clerks, stenographers, and other employees who work at the Foun- dation's headquarters, which occupy eight floors of a gleaming new office building at Madison Avenue and Fifty- first Street. The money was handed out in a hundred and eighty-two grants, the largest of which was for $25,OUO,- 000, given to the Fund for the Ad- vancement of Education, and the small- est for $900, given to PrInceton so that Professor Kazuo Midutani, of Kobe University could spend two more months in this country to complete a study of international trade. The big- gest slice of the money-$34,000,- OOO-went for education; $18,000,000 was spent on international programs; and the remainder was allotted to eco- nomics, public affairs, and the social, or, as the Foundation calls them, the